RED – The Relational Export Dataset

The Relational Export Dataset “RED” provides comparable dyadic trade data between nation-states for the period 1870 - present. This dataset is built in accordance with the analytical focus of the DFG-funded "Collaborative Research Centre 1342 - Global Dynamics of Social Policy" (CRC 1342). In principle, this large-scale project follows an interdependence-centered approach to explain the diffusion of governmental social policies from 1880 to the present. Trade linkages are an explanatory variable in this respect (Windzio et al., 2022). This requires temporally consistent data on interstate linkages for the largest possible sample of countries. So far, there has been no data set that meets these requirements. We, therefore, introduce a dataset which combines trade data from UN Comtrade (Comtrade, 2022), UNCTAD (UNCTAD, 2021), and the Correlates of War (COW) Project (Barbieri and Keshk, 2016). Unlike most databases, the data here does not represent absolute monetary trade volumes in a given currency. Rather, the data depicts the ratio of trade flows between two countries and the total exports of the specific exporting country. Hence, we measure trade in relational terms weighted by the respective importance of trading partners for one another. These relations are estimated from both an export and an import-oriented point of view; in this technical description, however, we focus on the ratios estimated solely with export values.